Downtime

Editor's Note: This editorial got confused with another one on Feb 20, we it is being re-run.

I was meeting with some people from Asempra the other day to talk about their product. They have a disaster recovery product that provides continuous data protection in a much more refined fashion than Microsoft's DPM or some other products. I'm always interested in new products, so it was good to sit down and talk about their technology and how they position their product in the market. They have chosen a data space pricing model, which is interesting. They don't care how many instances or databases you protect, or even services. Their appliance can protect SQL, Exchange, and file servers. They just judge by the TB.

As we were chatting, it got me thinking about the cost of downtime and the value of products like the

Asempra Business Continuity Server in both limiting downtime and ensuring that data is protected. I guess business still being conducted is up there as well. However I was curious how much of a risk this can be for companies and thought this would make a great Friday poll. So here it is:

Have you had unexpected downtime in the past year?

I'm specifically looking for SQL Servers or instances, and non-scheduled, non-maintenance type operations. I'm actually wondering about why unexpected downtimes you might have had. These could be SQL Server related, they could be Windows or even networking issues, but I'm curious how much of an issue you have.

At SQLServerCentral I haven't really been tracking this stuff. We've been very solid for years, so I'm a little ashamed to say I haven't bothered to set anything up. I do know we were down because of a networking hiccup with some routers at our hosting company, but I think that was just an hour or two.

In previous jobs we've definitely tracked this because it's usually a good number that I wanted to show my boss each year at review time. Typically I've seen some downtime because of a hardware failure on some instance, but it hasn't been a significant amount of time.

That is since I've been on
SQL Server 2000. When I ran a bunch of SQL Server 6.5 servers, we had a few days of downtime at a few times for various reasons. I am glad I'm not supporting those instances anymore.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.

Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

I really appreciate and value feedback on the podcasts. Let us know what you like, don't like, or even send in ideas for the show. If you'd like to comment, post something here. The boss will be sure to read it.

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